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Back Surrender Your Sons Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Author’s Note with Content Warnings
  2. CHAPTER ONE
  3. CHAPTER TWO
  4. CHAPTER THREE
  5. CHAPTER FOUR
  6. CHAPTER FIVE
  7. CHAPTER SIX
  8. CHAPTER SEVEN
  9. CHAPTER EIGHT
  10. CHAPTER NINE
  11. CHAPTER TEN
  12. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  13. CHAPTER TWELVE
  14. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  15. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  16. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  17. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  18. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  19. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  20. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  21. CHAPTER TWENTY
  22. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  23. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  24. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  25. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  31. CHAPTER THIRTY
  32. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  33. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  34. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  35. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  36. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
  41. CHAPTER FORTY
  42. EPILOGUE
  43. Acknowledgments

An inferno renewed in Molly, she loses no time in scooping a handful of dirt and pebbles before lobbing them down the road. The soil scatters noisily. A half-second behind it, Miss Manners’s rifle barks with another reply. The sound tears through my heart like it’s made of construction paper, but Molly’s distraction worked. “Now!” she hollers, faith-jumping from our blind spot into the shrouded labyrinth of green ahead. Marcos follows, achieving miraculous distance in a single leap as the scraping of the rifle bolt sounds again.

What are you waiting for, Major?!

I have no awareness of jumping. My eyes blur, my shoes depart from the ground, and I collide with a curtain of draping moss in an actual somersault. Not the graceful, Lady-Spy-in-a-Black-Catsuit movie somersault. This somersault is a series of brutal tumbles where the sky is up one minute and down the next; each time I roll, my jaw slams against something wet but hard.

Inside my fear-addled brain, the chittering of birds and insects morphs into a chorus of pained, humanlike screams, soon joined by another, more artificial noise: the crackle of Bill’s radio speakers. A voice follows, its fearsome power reaching into every corner of the woods:

“CONNOR MAJOR IS ESCAPING!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE SANCTUM

I have to have been wandering in the jungle for at least an hour. The dense canopy of palm fronds overhead spreads as wide as tarps, so I can’t even use the sun to track how long I’ve been lost. I always kept time by my phone, anyway.

All of this started because of my phone.

For the first twenty minutes after my escape from the watchtower, Miss Manners hollered over Bill’s loudspeaker for my immediate capture, but then suddenly, she stopped. That was ages ago, and her voice hasn’t returned. Not that I’m complaining; her booming orders rattled my spine, even as I fled deeper into Nightlight’s island wilderness. No matter how far I ran, her voice remained just over my shoulder: “CONNOR MAJOR IS ESCAPING. HE’S IN THE WOODS.”

The island’s woods are a lightless cocoon of massive palm stalks, underbrush nearly five feet tall, and coil after coil of twisting, moss-eaten roots. It’s impossible to run through nature this untouched—what I’m attempting is more like frantic, messy walking. I’ve traversed God knows how many upraised roots, and I keep rolling my ankles on pockets of the uneven ground hiding beneath the jungle floor’s bracken.

Molly and Marcos are nowhere in sight, but they have to be just as lost as I am.

Lost is good. It’ll be worse if we’re found.